Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
called Riverside and the Barns (for extensive horse barns here in the early years, later used by
park buses). Stagecoach drivers one hundred years ago dubbed this area Christmas Tree Park,
because a very old forest fire burn had been overgrown by a new forest of uniform lodgepoles.
The Madison River
A world-famous trout fishing stream, the Madison is extremely rich in the calcium bicar-
bonate needed for abundant plant growth, which furnishes hiding places for insects and
trout. The river flows westward out of the park through Hebgen and Quake lakes, then
turns north, and eventually joins the Gallatin and Jefferson to form the Missouri River near
Three Forks, Montana. Members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803-6 named the
three rivers but did not follow any of them into what is now park territory, since their mis-
sion was to reach the Pacific Ocean by the most direct route possible.
The three rivers were named for Thomas Jefferson, the visionary third U.S. president,
who conceived and authorized the Lewis and Clark Expedition; James Madison, Jefferson's
secretary of state, who became the fourth U.S. president in 1809; and Albert Gallatin, sec-
retary of the treasury under Jefferson.
Along the river was the site of one of the Wylie Camping Company's lunch stations.
Beginning in the 1890s and into the 1940s, William W. Wylie and his successors provided
stagecoach passengers and then motorists with low-cost tent camps and lunch stops.
1.7/12.2 Paved road for river access.
2.2/11.7 Montana/Wyoming state line. A small portion of the park is in Montana, even less
in Idaho, because the original Yellowstone boundaries were set in relation to their distance
from natural landmarks, before the states' boundaries had been established. As one example,
in 1872 Congress set the western boundary of the park to run “fifteen miles west of the most
western point of Madison Lake” (present-day Shoshone Lake).
3.0/10.9 Unmarked side road to the north leads to the western end of an accessible
boardwalk, the Two Ribbons Nature Trail. Interpretive displays at both ends of the trail ex-
plain the fire phenomena encountered. This is a three-quarter mile (1.2 km) loop walk that
splits in two, with one branch near the river, the other slightly away from it.
Between here and the east end of the Two Ribbons Trail is a stand of lodgepole pines that
burned in the 1988 fire. The snags don't have deep roots and can easily topple over, but park
officials only remove trees when they're obstructing roads or trails. As of 2012, however, most
snags had fallen and some new pines reach 10 feet tall.
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